Nobody even takes American Express these days, why would I want one?

"Mail for you!" The letter flopped onto my stomach and I stared at it with unseeing eyes. "It's a credit card!" My mother told me several other things that I'm sure were important at the time but they were lost as I curled into my pillow. Today was study day. Or study day number one. I almost told Emma no to drinking tonight but I told myself I could study and have fun together. I did it all last semester, hardly be different now. I tumbled out of bed around 11. Not a good start. I made it to the bus stop around half 1, worse middle. It was on the overly heated bus that I read my letter. By read I mean I scanned the majority of it, snorted and threw it in the first bin I came to at Uni. There was an overly complicated scenario involving a red coat that wasn't the right red and what to do if the shop wouldn't give you a refund. What exactly it was trying to say I have no idea, but this story went on for at least two pages. I've always wanted to do that. Write something, anything really, and select addresses to mail them to. I'd love to wake up one morning and find something like that hiding amongst my bank statements and junk.

I was going to write back to AmEx with something witty scrawled across my application for the card they'd never send an unemployed student with no income. Give the confused woman with the undesirable red coat some motivation. Maybe she was going through a rough patch with her husband and instead of realising she was in a doomed relationship she focussed on the coat instead. It was the wrong red! Anyone could see that!

But I threw all my ideas out with the letter. I'm just wittier in my mind, I guess.

I'm tired of living with my mind. She's too fast when I want peace and too slow when I want anything else. I'm sitting here staring at the work I have to do tomorrow if I can face it and the stories I'm itching to write with the taste of another man's beer in my mouth. A man with too big teeth and who took an age to say nothing. I let his hand rest on my hip and his eyes leer down my top and I didn't want him. I couldn't want him even when I tried. I'm oblivious to those who genuinely like me and throw myself at men I can't have. Women only love men they don't know.

I fill my head with bastards. Brontës, Bukowski, Byron, Hughes, Lermontov, and Plath. I devour their portraits of arrogance. I don't hate men, though I tease them shamelessly. I get my kicks from them until I'm bored and tell them they've failed but thanks for playing. I envy men. Sure they can be bastards, but they fascinate me so. Which brings me back to where I'm sitting with my regret and that awful taste in my mouth (I don't want to know why he tasted so bad) and truly I want my own bastard. I want someone to curl up beside me at night and murmur nonsense into the back of my neck. I don't need romance, I own enough novels. I want the kind of lust that clings to you until you shake it off with the sleep the next day. Where it leaves you light unless you tell someone and they make it pointlessly complicated in your head and drag you down with worries and regrets.

Really I'm just suffering from withdrawal. I've been going a little mad ever since my dad quit smoking. I don't know what to do. I can't start and I don't know enough smokers who'd appreciate me following them around for the smell. In fact I don't think anybody wants me doing that.

In the end the coat was just too red. Why won't you take it back?